160 years of war photography: an audiovisual guide to the world's most powerful conflict images

In 1854, Roger Fenton showed a cannon-blasted field in the Crimean war. In 2001, Simon Norfolk shot sheep among the ruins in Afghanistan. As a new exhibition opens, Tate Modern’s photography curator Simon Baker talks through some of the most iconic images of war

Fait #43, 1992Sophie Ristelhueber’s aerial views of the desert landscape of Kuwait after the first Gulf War evoke the technology of modern warfare, which relies on aerial bombardment, surveillance and missile strikes

Photograph: Sophie Ristelhueber. Courtesy of the artist and the National Gallery of Canada

The Japanese National Flag, Tokyo, 1965, from the series The MapOne set of images from the photobook The Map shows the effects of the atomic bomb still visible when Kikuji Kawada was photographing in Hiroshima from 1959 to 1961

Reims after the War, Plate XXXVIII, 1927In the months after the end of the first world war, the architect Pierre Anthony-Thouret documented the destruction of the historic city of Reims. Though it had no military significance, Notre-Dame de Reims was subject to repeated artillery and incendiary bombardment from the frontline nearby, becoming a symbol of collateral damage in north-east France

Bullet-scarred apartment building and shops in the Karte Char district of Kabul. This area saw fighting between Hikmetyar and Rabbani and then between Rabbani and the HazarasFrom 2001-2, Simon Norfolk recorded the ruins left after decades of warfare. Norfolk sees Afghanistan as a landscape marked by 30 years of conflict, including the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the civil wars that followed in the 1990s

Patio civil, cementero San Rafael, Malaga, 2009 70 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Luc Delahaye photographed the forensic exhumation of a mass grave containing the bodies of executed Republican prisoners

From the Weeds of Hiroshima, 1997João Penalva’s modern photograms mimic the horrifying imprints of people and wildlife left in Hiroshima in 1945, which were caused by the immense light from the nuclear explosion

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1854During the Crimean war, Roger Fenton took two photographs of a ravine that had come under cannon fire by Russian forces. Some scholars claim Fenton added the cannon balls in this photograph to increase the sense of danger. In the second image, the cannon balls are no longer on the track

Photograph: Roger Fenton. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London